I know the beavers at Nisus are busy working on an Outlining function for the next release of NWE. However, I would like to know what kind of outlining they are considering.

As a writer and translator, I find Word's outlining function much more useful than the "Outlining for Programmers" concept in More, Frontier, and iLiner etc. (MS Word's Outline function hasn't improved notably since I first started using it in Word 4, but it still knocks most other attempts at a similar function for six.) It is very helpful to be able to write a couple of paragraphs of text for a section, without having to worry too much about structure too much at that point. The biggest drawback of Word's version is its insistence on using the Styles is wants to use for the various heading levels.

If the Table function introduced in NWE 2 is anything to go by, we can reasonably hope that Nisus may improve on Word's Outline function. (Editing tables can occasionally be slow, but so can Word. The only notable omission is the lack of repeating row headers for tables that span multiple pages.) Since people's expectations of an Outline function are likely to vary, it may be useful for Nisus to solicit opinions on the type of outlining it's users hope to see.